Chapter 29 #2
"Yes," he said. "This one looks sad. And that one" — he pointed to a case three feet away — "looks angry. But the small one over there looks like she is trying not to laugh."
I looked. He was right. The expressions, which I had never noticed before, did differ, and the differences were, now that Edmund had pointed them out, striking in their variety and specificity.
"You have a good eye," I said.
"Cecilia says I notice things other people don't." He said her name with the simple, trusting affection of a child who has never had reason to question his sister's goodness. "She says I see the world differently. I don't know if that is a compliment or not."
"I think it is a compliment," I said.
He considered this and seemed satisfied.
He turned back to the mummy case and began tracing the outline of the painted face with his finger, following the curve of the cheekbone and the line of the jaw, and the tracing was careful and precise, the movement of a mind that was engaged in a private act of communion with something it did not fully understand but found compelling nonetheless.
We stood together in silence for several minutes, and the silence was comfortable, the silence of two people who are sharing an experience without needing to fill the space between them with words.
I had learned, in the course of the investigation, that silence was one of the most powerful tools available to an interviewer, because silence produced anxiety in the person being interviewed, and anxiety produced speech, and speech produced information.
But I was not, in this instance, interviewing Edmund.
I was simply standing beside him, sharing his interest in the mummies, and waiting for the conversation to develop in its own time and in its own way.
"My sister brings me here," he said, after a while.
"Every Thursday. She says it is good for me to see things that are old.
She says old things are honest because they cannot pretend to be something they are not.
" He paused. "I think she means that old things are like me.
I cannot pretend either. I have tried. It does not work. "
"What do you mean, it does not work?"
"When I try to pretend I am like other people.
Like the people at the parties Cecilia takes me to.
They smile, but the smiles are not real.
I can tell. Their eyes do not match their mouths.
Cecilia can do it. She can make her eyes match her mouth perfectly.
But I cannot. I have tried, and the trying makes my head hurt, and Cecilia says I should not try, because there is nothing wrong with being honest, and she is right, except that the honest people are the ones who get left out of the conversations, and I do not like being left out. "
The words landed with the weight of stones dropped into still water.
I looked at Edmund and saw, with a clarity that was almost painful, the cost of his simplicity: not the cognitive cost, which he did not perceive, but the social cost, the loneliness of a person who could see through the performances of others but could not perform himself, and who was therefore perpetually on the outside, looking in through glass at a world that was constructed, moment by moment, from the fabric of pretence.
"You are not left out here," I said. "The mummies do not perform, and you do not perform, and that is why you understand each other."
He looked at me with an expression that was, for a moment, so much like Cecilia's that I felt a sharp, almost physical pang of recognition, the same grey eyes, the same direct gaze, the same capacity for seeing through the surface of things to the machinery beneath.
But where Cecilia's gaze was calculated, Edmund's was not, and the absence of calculation was the thing that made his perception so disarming and so valuable.
"I like you," he said. "You are kind. Are you kind? I think you are kind."
"I try to be," I said.
"Cecilia says I should not trust strangers.
But you do not feel like a stranger. You feel like someone I have met before, except I know I have not met you before, because I remember everyone I have met, and I would remember you.
" He paused. "That does not make sense. I am sorry. Sometimes the words come out wrong."
"They came out right," I said. "I understood."
He smiled again, and the smile was the smile of a person who has been complimented and who is pleased by the compliment but who is too honest to pretend the pleasure is greater than it is.
"Cecilia says I talk too much. She says I should listen more and speak less.
But I always have things to say, and the things are inside me and they want to come out, and stopping them is like trying to hold water in my hands. The water always finds a way through."
"Perhaps Cecilia is wrong about that," I said. "Perhaps talking is one of your gifts."
He considered this with the seriousness he brought to everything, his brow furrowing, his eyes narrowing, his hands stilling on the glass of the mummy case.
"Cecilia is not often wrong," he said. "But she is sometimes wrong.
She does not like to be wrong. When she is wrong, she does not say so, but I can tell, because her mouth goes tight, like this" — he demonstrated, pressing his lips together — "and her eyes go to the left, and she is quiet for a long time, and then she says something that is not about the thing she was wrong about, but is about something else entirely, and the something else is always very interesting, and I forget about the wrong thing. "
I listened to this description of Cecilia with the attention of a man who is being given a map to a territory he has been trying to chart for months.
Edmund's observation about Cecilia's behaviour when she was wrong was, in its guileless way, a masterclass in the reading of a mind devoid of normal conscience, because it identified, with an instinct that no education could replicate, the exact mechanism by which Cecilia deflected attention from her errors: the physical tell of the tightened mouth, the directional cue of the eyes moving left, the verbal deflection to an unrelated but interesting topic.
These were the micro-expressions that I, a trained detective, had been trying to read for four months, and Edmund, a young man with the cognitive capacity of a child, had read them instinctively, simply by watching his sister with the attentive, non-judgmental gaze that was the natural instrument of his simplicity.
"Edmund," I said, and I was aware, as I said his name, that I was about to cross a line, the line between the legitimate pursuit of information and the exploitation of an innocent person, and the awareness did not stop me, because the investigation was in ruins, and the dead men deserved justice, and Edmund, in his honesty, was the only person left who might provide the information I needed.
"I wanted to ask you something. About the house. About Cecilia."
He looked at me. His expression was open and trusting, and the openness and the trust were, I knew, the very qualities that made what I was about to do so uncomfortable, because I was about to use those qualities against Cecilia, and the using felt like a betrayal, not of Cecilia, who deserved no loyalty, but of Edmund, who deserved better than to be a tool in someone else's war.
"Is something wrong with the house?" he asked.
"Cecilia says the house is fine. But sometimes I hear her walking at night, and she goes to the kitchen, and she talks to someone, except no one is there, and then she comes back upstairs, and her face is different, like she has been doing something important that she does not want me to know about. "
My heart was beating faster. I controlled my expression with the effort of a man who is swimming against a current and who knows that the current is stronger than he is.
"What do you mean, she talks to someone?"
"I do not know. I hear her voice, but it is quiet, and she is speaking in a language I do not understand.
French, maybe. Or Italian. Cecilia speaks a lot of languages.
She says it is useful for talking to people without them understanding what you are saying.
I do not think she means that to be as frightening as it sounds. "
"It is not frightening," I said. "It is just something that people who know languages do."
"Yes. But she goes to the kitchen at night, and the kitchen has the locked cupboard, and I think she is talking to the cupboard, except cupboards cannot hear, so she must be talking to herself, or to someone who is hiding in the kitchen, except no one is hiding in the kitchen, because I checked, and the only thing in the kitchen at night is the locked cupboard and the things in it. "
The locked cupboard. The cabinet in the stillroom.
Dorothea had told me about it, months ago, in the early days of the investigation.
A locked cabinet behind the cook's stores, the key always on Cecilia's person, the contents unknown.
Dorothea had speculated that the cabinet contained medicines or preparations of some kind, and the speculation had been, at the time, suggestive but inconclusive, because a locked cabinet in a kitchen could contain any number of innocuous things, and speculation, however suggestive, was not evidence.